How Alarmed Should We Be?

Voting Battles of 2022 Take Shape as G.O.P. Crafts New Election Bills

A new wave of Republican legislation to reshape the nation’s electoral system is coming in 2022, as the G.O.P. puts forward proposals ranging from a requirement that ballots be hand-counted in New Hampshire to the creation of a law enforcement unit in Florida to investigate allegations of voting fraud.

The Republican drive, motivated in part by a widespread denial of former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat last year, includes both voting restrictions and measures that could sow public confusion or undermine confidence in fair elections, and will significantly raise the stakes of the 2022 midterms.

After passing 33 laws of voting limits in 19 states this year, Republicans in at least five states — Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — have filed bills before the next legislative sessions have even started that seek to restrict voting in some way, including by limiting mail voting. In over 20 states, more than 245 similar bills put forward this year could be carried into 2022, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group that works to expand access to the ballot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/04/us/politics/gop-voting-rights-democrats.html

Trump's defeat has launched a series of measures by the POT to subvert democracy.

 

Freeman made a series of 911 emergency calls in the days after she was publicly identified in early December by the president’s camp. In a Dec. 4 call, she told the dispatcher she’d gotten a flood of “threats and phone calls and racial slurs,” adding: “It’s scary because they’re saying stuff like, ‘We’re coming to get you. We are coming to get you.’”

Maybe you should let Freeman know she has nothing to worry about from the people who came to her door and were pounding on it.

 

Not me that needs the help mate.. -- I'm not the one obsessed with Carrot Top .. -- Just telling you that Biden is making Red look like a sensible option .. and if Trump somehow manages to win the nomination- perhaps you will be blessed with another 4 years ...

 

The damages were to the economy, not democracy. Nobody is getting in the way of someone running for office.

 

What is Bill predicting now? I haven’t listened to him in a very long time.

 

Republican gerrymandering efforts used to focus mainly on diluting the influence of cities. Legislators could cram urban Democrats into one or two districts to preserve the surrounding districts for Republicans, or divide them among many districts in which they would be outvoted.

That hasn’t stopped. But redistricting maps approved this year show the battle lines radiating outward to the suburbs, where Republicans are trying to build levees against an increasingly Democratic and multiracial tide.

What’s striking is how thoroughly the shifting demographics of the suburbs have changed the task for mapmakers: The suburbs, historically used by Republicans to defend against the electoral threat of cities, are now themselves a threat.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/us/politics/suburbs-gerrymandering-republicans.html

They will never stop until federal legislation prevents them from gerrymandering. To the "they do it too" argument I say Dems can't afford to let Repubs be the only ones who gerrymander but are in favor of outlawing it.

 

Yawn. As I said, contempt.

 

Maybe your confusion results from a lack of sleep?

 

Nope. Unsurprising results don't hold my interest. Too many people crying "Wolf!" too easily these days.

 

Just wondering, do you dispute that Trump loyalists are replacing Repub election officials who may have strong beliefs on issues but are not willing to let those beliefs compromise their fidelity to election laws and or procedures? IOW, the search is on for more Jeffrey Clark's to replace folks like Raffensperger. The goal, corrupt the system from the inside out.

 

Nothing the Trumpists do surprises me. I just don't think it's important.

 

I guess the left believes if they just repeat the same lie over and over again, it becomes true.

Can you post me the quote from Trump that you believe orchestrated a coup?

 

Get back to me when you actually produce some facts. The only thing the op appears to have is a fear that the truth will be found out and Democrats will have to find another way to cheat their way to victory.

 

DOJ Sues Texas, Alleging Redistricting Maps Discriminate Against Black And Latino Voters

The Department of Justice is suing the state of Texas over its 2021 redistricting plans, which were approved by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in October.

Attorney General Merrick Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta announced the lawsuit during a press conference Monday. The complaint, filed Monday in U.S. district court in the Western district of Texas, alleges that both the new congressional map and the new state House map out of Texas are discriminatory.

“The newly-enacted redistrictng plans will not allow minority voters an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice,” Gupta said at the press conference.

The suit, like other lawsuits over the maps in recent months, began by pointing out that 95% of Texas’ population growth over the past decade came from Latinos, African Americans and other minority groups.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/...-discriminate-against-black-and-latino-voters

 

I am not worried about trump at all

trump will pretend to be running in 2024 as long as his followers continue to send him and the GOP money

the GOP is allowing him to stay prevalent ONLY because he draws good bank

trump will be indicted and not be allowed to hold public office

and whoever trump endorses will be the GOP nominee

I predict it will be DeathSantis of florida..

in return for trumps endorsement the Palm Beach airport will be named the trump airport

it wont be the first airport named for a crook

in the meantime

Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, Chris Christi, Mike Pompeo, and many other losers will try to get the nomination


But all will get crushed by trump...

if for no other reason than they cannot name an airport after him!! lol

trump no doubt is the greatest grifter of my lifetime,

despite being a lifelong republican I know a con artist when I see one

I will support ANY other GOP candidate other than dummy J trump

 

You guys? About the upcoming election?

With a pitch like this, how can you lose?

Politico: Dems' midterm sales pitch still that voters are too dumb to see their brilliance



"messaging rather than listening"

Great concept!

Still not learning.

We're constantly buried in your message. The problem is what your trying to sell.

Mix that with:

Like dogs returning to their vomit.[/quote]

 

Perdue Now Says He Wouldn’t Have Certified Georgia’s Election If He Were Governor

Former Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) would like everyone to know that unlike his rival Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), he would’ve taken things into his own hands following President Trump’s bogus claims of a “stolen” 2020 presidential election were he governor at the time.

Perdue told Axios on Wednesday afternoon that he wouldn’t have signed off on his state’s results.

“Not with the information that was available at the time and not with the information that has come out now. They had plenty of time to investigate this. And I wouldn’t have signed it until those things had been investigated and that’s all we were asking for,” he said.

Perdue also told Axios that he would have called for a special session of the legislature if he were Georgia’s governor last year. The former GOP senator then claimed he had asked Kemp to call the session at the time to “protect and fix what was wrong for the January election.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/perdue-challenge-2020-presidential-election-georgia-governor

This despite.........

Georgia reaffirms Biden's victory for 3rd time after recount, dealing major blow to Trump's attempt to overturn the results
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/07/politics/georgia-recount-recertification-biden/index.html

The MAGA god ticket has its first gubernatorial candidate openly saying he would have supported the coup. By their vote, the majority of House Repubs already did. For months, election officials seen as not being sufficiently loyal to the MAGA god have been purged. We should be very alarmed.

 

I'm sure Abbott is in a cloud of angst fueled fear now that not only is Dirtbag Molech Garland suing him but Beto has closed within 15 points!

Q-Poll: Gov. Greg Abbott leads Beto O'Rourke by 15 points


Should the GOP say goodby to Texas?

Dems closing in with messaging, optics and Latinx outreach!

 

Lots of people don't. That's the problem.

American democracy is tottering. It’s not clear Americans care.

During the opening speech at Thursday’s Summit for Democracy, President Joe Biden told the assembled international leaders that the stakes of their meeting were nothing less than existential: that the survival of democracy itself depended on what his audience did next. “We stand at an inflection point in our history,” Biden said. “The choices we make at this moment are going to fundamentally determine the direction our world is going to take in the coming decades.”

No one other than Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in the room to hear Biden’s call to action. The summit is a fully virtual affair due to the pandemic, with leaders of democratic countries speaking to each other via videoconference. Absent the applause and pageantry of an in-person event, Biden’s words rang strangely hollow. It was as if he was issuing a dire warning to no one in particular. This is a decent metaphor for the current American approach to democracy where it counts the most — at home.

There is no doubt that democracy in the United States is at serious risk. The year began with an attack on the Capitol designed to thwart the transition of power; instead of repudiating this violence, Republicans doubled down on the lie that Trump won the election and are working, right now, to rig the system in their favor. Neither Democrats nor the general public are doing much of anything to stop them.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/12/9/22824509/summit-for-democracy-biden-america

Like Trump's presidency when outrage after outrage became an accepted norm, the pillars of democracy are slowing eroding after relentless attacks from the POT.

 

The Horrifying Legal Blueprint for Trump’s War on Democracy

The John Eastman memo is a new high-water mark in Republican authoritarian thought.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/202...al-blueprint-for-trumps-war-on-democracy.html

The legal merits of the argument don’t matter very much — Eastman’s interpretation is widely derided as crazy, but the key point is that even if he’s right, he would have identified a wormhole in the Constitution permitting the vice-president to override the election results. Since the vice-president’s interests are typically aligned with the president’s, this power would allow the president’s party to stay in office through an indefinite series of elections.

To be sure, while Eastman’s argument persuaded the president of the United States and several officials close to him, it failed to sway many other leading Republicans, including its most important target: the vice-president himself. Most Republicans tend to dismiss episodes like Eastman’s memo as idiosyncratic ravings ignored by the powers that be. And it is possible the waning days of Trump will eventually be seen as the high-water mark of authoritarian sentiment within the party. But the bulk of the evidence suggests instead that it is a way station to a much darker destination.

 

TRUMP’S NEXT COUP HAS ALREADY BEGUN

“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/

 

Count me among those who are unconcerned.

 

I wouldn't bother posting about the clown if the majority of the POT was not still obsessed with Carrot Top.

 

I realize that.

American democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why.

Blocking an inquiry into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen, making it easier for partisans to tamper with the process of counting votes: These are not the actions of a party committed to the basic idea of open, representative government.

It’s common to call this GOP behavior “anti-democratic,” but the description can only go so far. It tells us what they’re moving America away from, but not where they want to take it. The term “minority rule” is closer, but euphemistic; it puts the Republican actions in the same category as a Supreme Court ruling, countermajoritarian moves inside a democratic framework rather than something fundamentally opposed to it.

It’s worth being clear about this: The GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...epublicans-authoritarianism-trump-competitive

 

That's just Democratic Party messaging.
"Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle." --Barber Conable